Some Days

Today we mostly seem to be getting nowhere.

I’m writing this up in word as our Orange Livebox seems to be incapable of finding the internet tonight.

We have assembled all the required bits for plumbing this entailed a visit to Bricomarche, Mr Bricolage and Castorama so it was about two this afternoon when we got back. On the plus side I now feel I could hold a fair decent conversation with a plumber about his bits. Not terribly useful in everyday life though unless you know a lot of plumbers.

This reminds me of an interesting conversation we had with Madame next door last week. We were just going out when she appeared with the dog lead we thought maybe Amos had gone missing. Amos by the way is a long chocolate brown short legged dog, sort of a Labrador head on a Bassett Hound body who lies in their back garden and sighs a lot. But no there was much more to it something to do with windows and roofs and Madame being too small. We asked if we could help and she led us round to the back of her house where Amos was pottering about in the garden. He had though, been up on the barn roof having jumped from the upstairs window and Madame was asking for help in getting him down. As it happened it took us that long to catch on that he’d somehow got himself down. Managing to communicate when you only have bits of a language is basically about guessing the gaps in your knowledge but who expects to be talking about a dog on a roof?

So we sprang into action this afternoon. First job put up the chauffe-eau (water heater). Starting with the drilling of the holes to bolt it to the wall. Two holes were achieved with only minor swearing even though the walls are granite. The other half then decided we should put the thing up on two bolts to get the measure for the bottom two.

This is a steel cylinder with a diameter such that you can’t get your arms round it to pick it up and so smooth that you couldn’t get a grip to lift it if you did have long arms and heavy enough that you don’t want to drop it on your foot, if you ever managed to pick it up that is. We did eventually get it on the wall after two cups of coffee a cup of tea and three fag breaks by means of dragging it up onto a storage box with the cushions from the dog settee making up the height difference but we broke a plastic bit off on the way. Thank goodness for super glue.

We decided the other holes had to be drilled with the tank where it was. Easier said than done as hole number three lined up with the mortar rather than the stone. The other half cleverly devised a bracket for the bracket which only resulted in an even larger hole in the crumbly soft mortar. We are now waiting for the cemented in bolt to set before we start on hole number four personally I can’t wait and it’s a shame I’ll be busy planting spuds or something.

On a positive note the weather has been warm and sunny (well we were spending the day in the cellar oops sorry I was being positive wasn’t I) and we saw another deer on the tea time puppy constitutional. Luckily the girls always have their noses to the ground and never see such interesting quarry.

Update the Livebox has decided it's no longer a sausage so this is yesterday's post today.

Today has been much better so far but I'll tell you about that later